National Park Service
Editor’s Note: Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, The Progressive ran a lengthy portrait of Dr. King by Atlanta-based writer Margaret Long, who knew him well over many years. On the fiftieth anniversary of his murder, we reproduce an edited excerpt of that piece here:
To live in the same town with Martin Luther King Jr. is to forget the moral grandeur, the constant courage ever aware of danger and death, the love that led his South’s and his country’s highest feelings, and the lustrous fame that shone around the world.
It is also to hear the gossip from this fellow whose best friend was at this party, the “inside” report on scandalous tapes secreted at the FBI, the story from a civil rights worker who heard him haughtily brush off another civil rights worker appealing for bail money for brothers in jail, the more generous and imaginative raconteurs who endowed him with a white mistress in every European capital, and the revelations of the writer who personally knew the Communists in his organization. And it is to digest these raunchy rumors and to say, in view of his life and death, what difference does it make?
So, in this little love song to the late Dr. King, I will leave it to his intimates and to the moral leaders, intellectuals, and historians to judge his heart and measure his stature, and I’ll remember the sweetness of his personality, the grace of his behavior, and the relish of his laughter, as I saw him from time to time. It is difficult to resist recalling how long young King was a prophet without honor in his own country—his native city, Atlanta—and I don’t see why I should resist. I’m not ordinarily given to old saws so I feel I can indulge in a strong old saw on the mournful and historic occasion of his assassination when Atlanta joined the nation and the world in outrage, sorrow, and appreciation of the martyred prophet and most tender attentions to the beautiful and bereft Coretta, his widow.
It is difficult to resist recalling how long young King was a prophet without honor in his own country—his native city, Atlanta—and I don’t see why I should resist.
So, I recall that in 1960 when Dr. King moved his family and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, fresh from the high and hard-won triumph of bus desegregation in Montgomery, to lead an ever-loving black revolution out of Atlanta, the move was recorded from here to New York and Los Angeles, and Calcutta, I reckon, as a portentous development in Negro Southerners’ fight for equality. I read Atlanta papers on the big day, searching for some notice of his arrival here where he was born, where his father is a prominent pastor, and where his grandparents are buried. There may have been a paragraph or so saying the Kings had come, but to save my life I can’t remember it.
When in 1960 Dr. King joined Atlanta University students in sit-ins, marches, and picketing for civil rights, the papers and television did cover this untoward commotion with front-page stories, pictures, and stunning television shots, accompanied by grave editorial comment to the effect that the students and Dr. King had a point, but that it should not be dramatized so perilously on our proud and peaceful streets. When, a year and a half later, the students and Dr. King, after a lot of jail-going and roughing-up, did desegregate part of downtown, the papers hailed this as a tribute to Atlanta shopkeepers and hash-slingers, our civic spirit, and the sweet and rational generosity of white folks in these parts.
Of course, whenever there’s a death, we all wish the loved one could have seen the flowers, the tears, and the grieving throngs, read the editorials, and forgiven the enemy rendered regretful and friendly by death.
So I wish that Dr. King could know that when Coretta was at the airport with two children to fly to Memphis, it was our Mayor Ivan Allen (a gentleman with a gift for gracious gestures) who rushed to tell her that he was dead, and that he and Mrs. Allen drove her home and stayed consoling with her for an hour or so. I wish he could know that the stately Episcopal Cathedral of St. Phillip’s, which once turned away Negro kneelers-in, held a memorial service for him and that many other white churches paid him solemn homage. I wish he could know that the Constitution and Journal for days played his final story with space comparable to that of the Kennedy assassination.
He knew, as he and his wife told me and anybody else who asked them, that any or all of the family of six might die any day.
Of course, King must have known all the time that when he died or was killed, the President, the Pope, and rulers around the world would grieve and pay tribute. (And he knew, as he and his wife told me and anybody else who asked them, that any or all of the family of six might die any day.) But I doubt if he knew that his hometown which had so grudgingly recognized him under the pressure of worldwide adulation, would so mourn him, honor him, and love him at his death.
It is not up to me to point out his courage, which has been proclaimed and questioned. To be sure, he has been surrounded by lieutenants and bodyguards, whisked away from precarious situations, and has occasionally avoided a perilous confrontation.
But any fool can see that he braved the fiercest and foulest jails in the South, staked himself and his family day by day for fourteen years against the sniper's guns and the Klan's bombs, and offered his person in the good cause from Selma to Chicago and Memphis, where one of them finally got him.
I wondered, why did he linger on the balcony where he could be shot? One might as well ask why did he march on Washington, conduct Sunday church services in Atlanta, preach in Chicago, or march to Montgomery?
Beloved of the humble millions of the earth, hated and feared by lords of his own South and laden with international honors, young Dr. King, for all the opulence of his old fashioned oratory, kept so plain.
He never forgot that the mantle of Moses fell on him hastily and almost haphazardly, that he was chosen among several young ministers to lead the Montgomery bus boycott when Mrs. Rosa Parks, sick and tired and fed up, just sat there and wouldn't move to the back of the bus in 1955. He often said the others would have risen to the leadership as handsomely as he did, because they would have had to.
I wondered, why did he linger on the balcony where he could be shot? One might as well ask why did he march on Washington.
Marching on the Montgomery capitol with the eyes of the world on him, he stepped from the front ranks to speed to meet, embrace, and laugh joyfully with two obscure women, old family friends, parishioners perhaps, or maybe neighbors who came to help in the kitchen years ago. He seemed to remember everybody, the camp followers, the fawners, the simple people who loved him, bumptious new youngsters in SCLC, and old enemies when they finally proffered the hand of approval.
His personal presence was always warm and winsome because, I dare say, he kept so plain.
MARGARET LONG was a native Southerner and writer who wrote extensively on the civil rights movement in the South. She edited The New South and taught journalism at Clark College in the Atlanta University Center.
To read more about Martin Luther King Jr. visit: http://progressive.org/topics/martin-luther-king-jr./